I'm not even sure there, at least for another few years. No store, mom and pop or otherwise, would want to be "tap to pay only" as a means of taking credit card payments. There are still plenty of cards out there that don't have RFID chips.
If I go to the farmers market on the weekend, they all accept cash or tap-to-pay with a Square tap-only reader, and that’s it.
It looks like they are going through similar weird things with instant bank transfers. In Australia all the major banks just have instant transfers built in. I use the bank app to transfer to friends and they get notified. In the US you Venmo or PayPal or whatever.
The first time I was able to use ApplePay (as an American) was on a trip to NZ. In fact, the clerk at the gas station was shocked to see someone pay with their phone, even though this had been possible with Android for some time, and even though contactless itself was old hat there.
As for the SIM thing, that just depends so much on the business model and regulatory environment. Pay as you go is relatively unpopular in the US, and the availability reflects that. But it's not like Italy, where I had to hand over my passport (!) to get a SIM, or Germany, where I had to document where I was "living". I've heard it's even worse in, say, Chile, where you virtually need to be a citizen or permanent resident to get a SIM.
BUT contact free payment via card and Apple Pay contact free payments are slightly different and I’ve been to POS terminals that had one but not other. But the point was that there exists cards that don’t have nfc capabilities, including the one made by the company at center of article.
They are very, very similar that this surprises me. Apple/Google pay implement the same standards as wireless cards and it should Just Work(TM) everywhere the cards can be accepted. Obviously real life and 'should' don't always marry up.
But it was one of the big drivers of acceptance of the tech in most places - the infrastructure is already there! You probably don't even need to update the firmware on your reader!
> including the one made by the company at center of article.
Sure, but my point is that I believe that's deliberate, because they want you to use the contactless payment capability of your phone. I don't doubt there are other cards out there without the capability, I just think the apple one isn't a great example.
The US may be an anomaly here, but it always has been. The UK had chip and pin roll out while the US still had mag stripe being the most common; we slowly added chip and signature (we still don't have chip and pin), and now we still aren't anywhere close to universal in tap to pay.
In the USA maybe. Elsewhere it's already huge.